


Diagnoses

by mosttroubledbird (howlikeagod)



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: F/M, Multi, i'm not a scalie but i'm also not a coward, more! lizard! dick(s)!, second citadel, thank you Moomin Herman for my life, vague future time where they're polyam & in love & nobody is trying to kill anyone, yep we're back with that tag and better than ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 04:00:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14686008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlikeagod/pseuds/mosttroubledbird
Summary: The Swamp of Titans’ Blooms is never quiet.Lord Arum can't sleep. Rilla is going home in the morning. Both are excellent at using their time wisely.





	Diagnoses

**Author's Note:**

> Let Rilla Fuck The Lizard 2k18

“Subject: Lord Arum of the Swamp of Titans’ Blooms. Observations: restlessness, mood swings, increased irritability—more than usual, I mean—”

“Are you quite finished?” Arum grumbles. His eyes stay fixed on his work, but the way his tail twitches in Rilla’s direction means she has his attention.

“Not even close,” she says merrily, moving into the room from where she’d been leaning in the doorway, just watching. She likes to watch Arum work. “Self-isolation, lack of sleep, minor pain and muscle cramping in the spinal regions, inattentiveness, a general _refusal to listen to anyone._ ”

Arum hisses quietly. His tail slithers across the earth-and-stone floor of the Keep and wraps loosely around his ankle.

“Diagnosis,” Rilla continues, “overworking yourself.” She reaches toward one of his wrists (right anterior radiocarpal; he hates it when she tries to label his anatomy, as interesting [ _scientifically speaking_ ] as it is) and pulls gently. He’s holding a tool that Rilla might call a screwdriver if he weren’t using it to paste legs onto something that squirms weakly in two of his other hands.

“You’re one to talk,” he snaps. “Staying up for weeks on end, tending to your patients—”

“Arum.”

“—when they’re already on the mend. Making your precise little sketches of every flora and fauna you come across—”

“Arum,” Rilla repeats.

“—wasting your time on _mathematics.”_ The last word is a sneer. “And now you have the gall to ‘diagnose’ me?”

“Arum!” Rilla squeezes his wrist urgently.

“What?” He blinks down at Rilla with irritation for a moment, then hears it: the faint, pained cries coming from the legless creature between his claws. He relaxes his hands in an instant and it falls, pitifully, onto the work table. “Ah. I see.”

“Doctor’s recommendation,” Rilla says, wrapping her other arm around Arum’s back, “get some rest.”

“I—” He clears his throat. “I suppose I won’t be getting any work done this evening if I ignore such sound medical advice, _takatakataka.”_

He uses his other three hands to clean up his workstation, treating the creature he nearly popped in his claws with obvious care; Rilla’s hand doesn’t leave his wrist, and he does not pull it away.

“I could use a good night’s sleep too,” she says, walking in step with him. His legs are longer, his slithering stride still uncanny to Rilla’s human eyes even after all this time, but he keeps pace with her. “I have to head back in the morning.”

“So soon?” Arum asks.

Rilla giggles.

“What? What’s so funny?” he rattles, tail swishing in a wide arc, “you haven’t been here all that long, surely.”

“Nothing, nothing.” They reach Arum’s bedroom. He walks in first, and Rilla takes a moment to think about how very different he is from Damien in some ways. “It’s just… cute.” 

In others, not so much.

“Cute?” He glares suspiciously, like this is some foreign accusation.

“Just, when you try to act like you’re not disappointed. When you try to be all casual about it.” The frill around Arum’s neck puffs out slightly, more with each passing second. Rilla grins. “You’re a really, _really_ bad liar, Arum.”

“Well!” He turns to hang up his cloak and change out of the stained robes he wears around his workshop. “Why should I learn to lie? Just like humans, isn’t it, to obfuscate truth and call it a talent. When you reach for _infinite_ truth—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Rilla climbs into the soft, spongy growth the Keep has grown for Arum’s bed—noticeably bigger than it once was, easily big enough for three—and stretches her arms high above her head. “But it’s still cute.”

“I—” He pauses for a long time, fiddling with the waistband of the loose smallclothes he wears to bed. “Thank you, Amaryllis. You are also…” He hisses softly, and the next word comes out between his teeth. “Cute.”

“Thank goodness you said it like that,” Rilla collapses onto the bed in exaggerated relief. “I don’t think I could handle _two_ poets expounding on my beauty. What would I do?”

Arum gives a raspy chuckle and climbs in beside her. “Yes, Damien is… verbose.”

“I love him,” Rilla sighs.

“So do I.”

They lie like that, silent, breathing. The Keep breathes around them, life inside every particle caught floating in the air. Arum’s endless speeches about the majesty of the cosmos and the wonders of magic can be a lot to handle, but in these quiet moments, she thinks she comes close to getting it. Arum’s methods are still erratic and messy and infuriating and— But. She can see what’s special about what he does. Rilla reaches out and takes one of his claws in her hand. He goes willingly, and Rilla kisses the soft, dry skin of his knuckles.

“He said he might have a day to get away for a visit next week,” Rilla comments. Arum’s violet eyes brighten in the dusky light of the room.

“That would be very…” He doesn’t need to finish the thought. Rilla understands, and Arum understands that. “But you won’t be here?”

“No,” Rilla shakes her head. “I’ve nearly been away too long already.”

“Of course.” Arum sighs contentedly as Rilla lays her head on his chest, tucked firmly under his chin.

During her visits with Arum, the distant chattering of the Swamp lulls Rilla to sleep more often than it keeps her up. The sound of the outside world teeming with life at every second of every day is not unlike her home outside the walls of the Citadel. In appearance and in, well, whatever abundance of species live in the Swamp of Titans’ Blooms, the jungle around her home is nothing like it at all, but the way the irregular sounds of life fade together into a quiet buzz has always put Rilla at ease.

She’s dozing, well on her way to sweet dreams against the warm plane of Arum’s chest, when she feels a twitching against her arm.

At first, Rilla assumes it’s the usual little movements of a bedfellow getting comfortable. She feels it again, and another by her leg, and the rhythmic sound of Arum’s tail against the bed.

“Arum?” she whispers.

“Yes, Amaryllis?” He sounds distant. She opens one eye and watches Arum’s claws tap against the surface of the bed in a frantic rhythm.

“You don’t look like you’re sleeping.” She lifts her head and sees one of his other hands slowly picking a hole in the soft material under his back.

“Of course I’m not sleeping, we’ve only just lain down. I can’t just fall unconscious whenever I please, _takatakataka.”_ His eyes flash in the half-light, seeking out some pattern on the ceiling Rilla wouldn’t find if she tried.

“No, but you’re not exactly peaceful.” Rilla shifts to the side to watch his face. “Something on your mind?”

Arum grumbles.

“What was that?”

“I said,” he glances toward the door, “I’m just thinking about my work.”

“Can’t get to sleep, huh? Too much rattling around in that big, stubborn brain of yours.” Rilla taps him on the forehead; his eyes blink half shut slowly, reflexively, in response, and something warm and sticky and bright cracks open in Rilla. 

Symptoms: elevated heart rate, dilated pupils, a little flicker of magic.

Diagnosis…

“Want some help taking it _off_ your mind?”

Arum’s head tilts curiously. It’s a human gesture and an inhuman one; Rilla has a theory about curiosity she’s been toying with lately in her spare time, a treatise on magic and science and when they aren’t two separate things at all, when they are more than the sum of their parts—

“And how do you plan to do that, Amaryllis?” His voice is rough and dry, friction against the kindling of her thoughts. One of his clawed hands rests on Rilla’s lower back.

She runs her fingers gently over the edge of Arum’s frill. He often has trouble reading her face. He’s not used to human expressions, she guesses. It’s not such a problem with Damien, who speaks his heart like he needs it to breathe, but Rilla tends to think things through before she says them. More precise. So rather than blinking coyly up at Arum, Rilla speaks her mind.

“The release of certain chemicals in the brain can help put you to sleep,” Rilla says. She presses a little closer with her hand at Arum’s throat, thumb skimming the spot where the folds of his frill part like curtains. “And physical activity just plain tires you out. It’s an old trick, one of the oldest in the book.”

“Nothing magical about it, then?” Arum places another hand on Rilla’s waist, and another cups the side of her face. She leans into it, presses closer.

“I wouldn’t say that.” Rilla ducks her head and puts her lips where the thin skin of Arum’s frill meets the edge of his jaw. He’s sensitive there; she can’t kiss him like she kisses Damien, but experimentation yields positive results. “I like to think of it as a meeting point. Things coming together.”

A quiet noise escapes Arum’s throat. It’s a high hum, not unlike the way Damien sighs under her mouth—or whimpers. Rilla parts her lips and lets her tongue run gently along his cool, smooth skin.

“Amaryllis,” he breathes. The sounds of her name in his voice: airy at first; dipping rough and glottal in the middle; ending on a long hiss. It feels new and impossible, every time.

Rilla runs her palm across Arum’s pectoral. His scales are broader there, still yielding like flesh but thicker than his throat, his hands, the insides of his thighs. She could dig her nails in and not leave a mark. Has done, in fact—tonight, though, tonight feels more tender than that.

“Take your pants off, Arum,” Rilla instructs, reaching around to undo the clasp of her dress. It’s loose fabric, good for lounging around the Keep of a lizard lord. She wriggles out of it while Arum sits up to disrobe and lets both their clothes fall to the floor.

Arum’s gemstone eyes track over her body. His stare is quick and precise, like his knives in a fight, taking in just what he needs to see and moving on and on to find as much as possible, as soon as possible. The bed is soft under Rilla’s bare back; she splays herself out, waits to see what Arum will do. 

She doesn’t have to wait long.

Arum rolls over to hold himself above her; graceful, a pounce like the predator he is. Two clawed hands and two clawed feet anchor him to the bed. Rilla wants to reach for him, wants to pull him down until their bodies leave a Rilla-and-Arum-shaped dent in the soft growth for Damien to find when he visits. She wants every piece of him, this pompous and adoring creature. She wants them both. 

She knows they want her too, and each other, and the feeling of having what she should have never even thought to want leaves Amaryllis of Exile covetous and dizzy some days.

His wide mouth parts, tongue sliding out between his short, sharp teeth, and Rilla shivers. It’s warm and wet and the tip traces over Rilla’s throat, coaxing a sigh from her mouth and the thrill of goosebumps from her skin. Arum has a _fascinating_ tongue: long (he refuses to let Rilla measure it) and dextrous. Rilla has read two separate drafts of a poem about Arum’s tongue that Damien swears will never see the light of day until it goes through enough revisions to turn the whole thing incomprehensibly metaphorical. He’s been trying his hand at elegiac couplets, Saints bless him

Rilla cradles Arum’s head between her hands, guiding gently as he moves lower to run his tongue over her breasts. She gasps again, squeezes encouragingly at his strong shoulder (left anterior acromioclavicular joint [there are so many words she has to string together to quantify him]) and hitches a thigh over his leg. His limber tongue wraps around her nipple, toys with it teasingly until she feels the sensation send a warm pulse between her legs.

“Arum,” she sighs, the name floating from her mouth like the flowers in the swamp that unfurl their petals in the morning sun. The clawed hands on her hips tighten—not enough to hurt, but a promise that he’s there, that he hears her and wants her and isn’t going anywhere.

After all the scares he and Damien have given her, she appreciates the reminder.

The way his arms move as he shuffles back, down her body—it’s hypnotic, forearms crossing like a knight’s shield stance and uncrossing again. Like watching some galloping beast run nearly too fast to focus on, limbs flying in controlled chaos. Rilla knows how a body moves, but watching anything animate contain its own power takes her breath away, now and then, the whole improbability of continued existence.

His tongue, trailing down Rilla’s belly, that’s another wonder and a welcome distraction. Arum reaches the apex of her thighs and stops, poised just over where she needs him. The tapered end of his tongue laves over the crease of her thigh.

Rilla groans and wiggles her hips. One hand falls on the crown of Arum’s head—he pretends to get offended when she gets pushy, but Rilla knows he likes it, likes having someone go toe-to-toe with him. Regardless of what he says, he loves it when things aren’t so easy. They are, all three of them, altogether too fond of a challenge.

“We don’t have all night, you know,” Rilla says softly, slight leading pressure to the top of Arum’s head, sliding her palm up to the ridge of his parietal bone. The hard spines along the back of his head rise under her hand as Arum moves closer, deeper, to the core of her.

His tongue twists, teasingly, over where she’s wet and nearly aching. He doesn’t push inside; his strong tongue runs over her folds and up to her clit, rolling in a wave, slipping against her skin until Rilla has no idea how much wetness is hers and how much is his. He rattles deep in his throat—Rilla knows it for a sound of delight, she’s coaxed out of him before how much he loves this—and the vibration runs down his tongue and into Rilla. She throws her head back against the bed, spine arching up and all the hair at the top of her braid pulled loose and erratic.

“That’s enough,” Rilla pants, although it’s _not._ It is nearly enough, in one sense, but she has plans for Arum tonight and if he takes her apart like this she’ll never get to them.

He pulls back immediately. His violet eyes are wide and sharp when they meet hers. He runs his tongue over his thin lips, shiny in the dim light, and rasps a question.

“What would you like me to do, Amaryllis?” His tail twitches in the air behind him. From this angle—from a lot of angles, really—it’s staggering how broad Arum really is. He’s sleek and fast, but that dexterity comes from a powerful body of muscle and bone.

“On your back,” Rilla says, breathless. “Please.”

“Oh, suddenly she has _manners,”_ Arum mutters. The quiet tension of the moment breaks, and Rilla can’t help but laugh. Here, of all places, he decides to be _petty._

The corner of Arum’s mouth quirks up as he rolls onto his back. Rilla might not have caught it, once upon a time. Now it gleams like the spotlight blossoms that wave their long lines of light back and forth into the sky over the Swamp on dark nights. Unmissable. Impossible to miss.

“Well, _Lord Arum,”_ Rilla grins down at him and pulls the tie out of her braid, running a hand through to let her long hair fall in thick waves over her shoulders and back, “my turn.”

She swings a thigh over his hip and braces both hands, fingers splayed, on Arum’s chest. He blinks up at her; she can feel the catch in his breath, and it makes her _powerful._ This isn’t the proper seat for her, is it? The lap of a lord? A monster, vulnerable beneath her.

There’s a good damn reason Rilla insisted on keeping the title of Exile. She doesn’t really give a damn about “proper,” if she’s honest.

Rilla grinds down eagerly and feels Arum’s hardness (everted hemipenes—that’s _enough,_ Rilla, stop thinking) run in smooth ridges against her. A hiss escapes him, between rows of bright white teeth. The claws of his lower hands clench again in the bed. Rilla feels herself smirking, has no reason to stop, and reaches down to position him.

Arum always feels strange inside her at first. It’s another thing she’s discussed privately with Damien, although he has less baseline for comparison. As she relaxes her thighs, rocks down onto him, Rilla can’t help but moan quietly at the flare of the head, the hard bumps along him, the way he fits so bizzairely and wonderfully.

Arum’s breath comes heavy and quick out his nose. He doesn’t like to be vocal in bed, but Rilla is nothing if not observant.

“How’s that?” Rilla rolls her hips once, again, getting the feel for him. She loves it, loves _this_ : the stretch, the fullness, the scales along his hips rubbing against the skin of her inner thighs. She reaches for his other organ, not quite where she wants it, and— Yes, and _there._

Arum chokes on his own gasp. The sound runs up her spine and Rilla starts to move, fucks him hard and with everything she has. 

He’s pumping in and out of her, symmetrical ridges and bumps that light Rilla up from the inside out, push at every corner she had no reason to know was there.

She falls forward on her hands again. Her hips work hard, Arum’s second hemipene (there just isn’t a more accurate word, even Rilla can admit that science isn’t always sexy) grinding right up against her clit. She gasps high, long notes right over Arum’s face, nearly a melody. Rilla just might open her mouth and _sing_ with it.

Hands are on her—dry, soft hands, careful of their claws—and Rilla doesn’t know when they got there but Saints, is she glad to feel them. Two on her hips, helping her along now that a quiver in her thighs has started. One on her left breast, incredible contrast to the soft, warm skin there. 

The last cups the side of her neck. Arum’s careful fingers brush away locks of hair sticking to her skin with sweat. His thumb skims her jaw; one thorn-sharp claw brushes so close to her mouth that Rilla feels a burst of worry she’ll cut her bottom lip on it.

No, not _worry._ Not quite. More a strange, bloody sort of excitement that stutters the rhythm of her hips. She’s gasping Arum’s name, he’s hissing hers, back and forth and overlaid in the chaos of creating something new. Something building in her abdomen, a rising warmth that overtakes her the moment Arum leans up and swipes his tongue over the hollow center of her throat.

Arum rocks her through it: steady, driving thrusts. One arm comes around her waist as Rilla’s head tips back in pleasure; her thighs are good for nothing but trembling, quick pushes, sparking out from every place she touches him until her whole body shakes with it.

“Amaryllis,” Arum grunts. His arms are tight around Rilla and she nods voicelessly. Her spine is turning to jelly but there is an insistent heaviness between her legs, and Arum is still hard and wild-eyed.

“Don’t you worry,” Rilla says, a huskiness in her voice, a satisfying creak. She tips her head back to shake the hair out of her face and starts to ride him again.

This is less their previous enthusiastic fucking—she only has so much energy, her legs will be pleasantly sore tomorrow—and more bouncing in Arum’s lap, small movements on the fine line between over-sensitization and bliss. He’s close; Rilla can hear it in the quick breaths and moans he has stopped holding back. She can feel it, too, hitching his hips up into her and panting against her shoulder.

His mouth hangs open against Rilla’s clavicle. He could bite her whole arm off if he wanted, but instead he’s at her mercy. 

The tender feeling in her heart boils over at just about the same moment she comes again. The two are not related. They are, however, each enough on their own to wrench another shout of Arum’s name from Rilla’s mouth.

All four of his arms tighten around her—Rilla has probably felt safer at some point in her life, but in the moment she can’t think of one—and he finishes with a strangled rattle. Further experimentation would be necessary to find out if it was Rilla’s voice or the way she tightened around him at her own climax that did it, but either way the results are the same: Arum comes, hard, inside her and across her lower belly, gasping, half curled around Rilla’s body as if she’s the secret to unlocking the universe.

Arum raises his head, amethyst eyes burning. Rilla feels the steady pound of his heart under her hands. She feels as if she’s holding it, a scarlet gemstone the size of her two fists put together. Rilla leans forward and presses a long kiss right between his eyes.

“Well,” Rilla laughs as her back hits the bed. Her hair will be a travesty in the morning, but she finds she doesn’t mind. “I certainly feel tired out, don’t you?”

“I…” He runs two hands over his face, and then Rilla hears it, a rare and precious sound: Arum’s rasping laugh. “I would say so, yes. Your, _ahem,_ advice as a medical professional seems to have been sound.”

“That’s high praise.” Rilla settles onto her side and reaches for Arum, who reaches right back. His head fits under her chin when he sleeps curled up like this.

Eyelids already drooping, Arum mutters something that sounds suspiciously like, “well, you _are_ the best.”

At any other time, Rilla would tease him a little. Ask if that’s only by _human_ standards, and if so, what kind of medical licensing monsters have— But she’s nodding off, herself, now. She has a full morning’s walk tomorrow, reports she’s been neglecting, plans with Marc soon…

The Swamp of Titans’ Blooms is never quiet. Life abounds in every corner, made of magic and science and more than the two. Things are awake, calling out in the dark for hunger or joy or love. And things sleep, fulfilled by their share of all three.

**Author's Note:**

> This may be the first Rilla/Arum fic but I sure hope it's not the last. Make me proud, fellow non-scalie non-cowards!
> 
> EDIT 5/19: you should always pee after PIV sex! Rilla is a responsible medical professional and would know this! please forgive my oversight!!


End file.
